Kinetics of sequential reaction of hydrolysis and sugar degradation of rice husk in ethanol production: Effect of catalyst concentration

This study focuses on kinetics of rice husk hydrolysis using sulfuric acid catalyst to produce sugars. The experiments were conducted at various catalyst concentrations. It turned out that during hydrolysis, degradation of sugars was encountered. The kinetics was expressed with both homogeneous and heterogeneous models. At catalyst concentration of higher than 0.44 N, heterogeneous model works better than homogeneous model, while at the lower, both models work well. In the heterogeneous model, it is observed that the mass transfer of sulfuric acid in the particles and the hydrolysis reaction control the rate of hydrolysis. The mass transfer can be described by Fick’s law with the effective diffusivity of 1.4 × 10−11 cm2/s, while the hydrolysis and sugar degradation rate constants follow Arrhenius equations. In addition, it was experimentally observed that the sugars produced can be converted to ethanol by fermentation using yeast.